A youth sports blog written by Bob Cook. He's contributed to NBCSports.com, or MSNBC.com, if you prefer. He’s delivered sports commentaries for All Things Considered. For three years he wrote the weekly “Kick Out the Sports!” column for Flak Magazine.
Most importantly for this blog, Bob is a father of four who is in the throes of being a sports parent, a youth coach and a youth sports economy stimulator in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago. He reserves the right to change names to protect the innocent and the extremely, extremely guilty.
You can follow me at facebook.com/notgoingpro and twitter.com/notgoingpro. I'm endlessly fascinating.

Stop Telling Youth Sports Parents To Shut Up

No doubt, there are a lot of parents out there who are every awful thing you’ve ever heard about the excesses of sports mothers and fathers, and I’ve talked about them as much as anyone else. However, I would like to take this opportunity to offer a reminder to, please, let’s not look at parents as the enemy when it comes to youth sports.

With roughly 4,000 basketball games played per year at The Fieldhouse in Fishers, founder and director Scott Burton witnesses the good side of youth sports on a daily basis: competition, camaraderie, individual improvement and team success.

Then there’s the unseemly underbelly of youth sports.

The parents.

Excuse me, THE unseemly underbelly? You mean of all the junk that’s pulled in youth sports, by schools, coaches, club teams, recruiters, hustlers, agents, hangers-on and wanna-bes as a young player tries to get that elusive college scholarship on the way to a pro career, the unseemliest side of the unseemly underbelly is parents? This is especially a surprising statement coming from the article’s author, Kyle Neddenriep, who does a good job covering youth sports and college recruiting.

Then again, that’s what the experts in the field are telling Neddenriep — that it’s likely parents’ behavior would be identified as the No. 1 problem in youth sports.

Now, recognition that sports parents can get a little over the top is not new. There were parents who were jerks about sports when I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, and I’m guessing many of you can go further back to find examples of fathers and mothers who seemed to be a little too competitive. (Note: the original “Bad News Bears,” the seminal movie satire of youth sports excess, was released in 1976). However, what I’ve noted over time is that the relationship between parents, and their kids’ coaches and leagues, are set up to be antagonistic from the start. How many of you parents were sat down before a season and told how to behave, as if all of you were small children yourselves? How many of you have sat through such ridiculousness as “Silent Soccer,” where to keep parents from saying stupid things, no one is allowed to say anything at all?

Two things from this “silent soccer” video. First, a baby is crying, and then silent — did the soccer police take the baby away for violating the no-talking rule? Second, I love how the mom whispers loudly so she can have the feeling of yelling without, presumably, anyone hearing her.

Without condoning the parents who are true, psychopathic, kid-destroying idiots, a few things that we all should keep in mind about sports parents:

1. People are generally irrational about their children. A coach or program that expects — no, demands — parents to view their players in the same cold, rational way he, she or it does is going to have even more conflict with Mom and Dad than usual. I remember reading Fredric Dannen’s book, “Hitmen,” which was a look inside the record business circa 1991, and it opened with the conflict that bands and their managers often had with record labels, and Dannen called it “One Career.” As it, the managers saying that their acts only have One Career, while, you, record label, will live on no matter what happens to my band. (Unless, of course, the Internet becomes popular in a few years.) The parents’ child has only One Childhood, while a coach or program will live on no matter what happens to that child. Unless…

2. Youth sports is not immune from the consumer economy — and parents know this. In the Indianapolis Star’s story, there is an acknowledgement that one thing has changed mightily in the last decade or so:

In the exploding world of “elite” club sports, parents are investing more time and money to develop their children into athletes. A season can cost a family $5,000 in assorted expenses and as many as 50 days on the road.

With that investment often comes a sense of entitlement.

“In essence, it’s consumerism,” said Mark Britner, who has coached elite club volleyball in Central Indiana for 24 years. “Now it’s, ‘I’ll take my kids somewhere else’ if an issue arises. There are so many more club programs now, it’s amazing. Parents want more input and control.”

In the extreme, think of David Sills creating a football program out of nothing to showcase his son, the one who got a scholarship offer from USC in the eighth grade. (With the decision by Red Lion Christian in Delaware to boot the football program off campus because of money issues, Sills has gotten the best players to join him in a made-up school called Elkton (Md.) Eastern Christian Academy, which “meets” for class online only through an organization called National Connections Academy. (If you wonder if Sills worries about what the world might think of this arrangement, figure that the new “team” is nicknamed the Honey Badgers, who, as we know, don’t care.)

The point being, if a parent doesn’t like a particular league or school, it’s easy enough to just up and move the kid elsewhere. Is that always the best thing? Of course not. Does this mean a coach or league has to kowtow to a parent’s every whim? Of course not. But it does mean that an organization has to be attuned to what its customers — in this case, the parents — are wanting. No business can survive just taking someone’s money and then being all Honey Badger about it, and youth sports — which is a business — is no exception.

At the least, a sports organization can be clear about it intentions, stick to them, talk to parents about them, and then maybe the parents who don’t like this arrangement will take their child elsewhere before they write the check. Because after that check clears, the customers, the parents, are rightfully going to have the standing to speak up. As I’ve noted in another post, parents’ perceived irrationality is often an economically rational response to the amount of money and time they, and their child, are sinking into youth sports.

3. Given points No. 1 and 2, it behooves coaches and leagues to ask parents about their expectations. I’ve sat in plenty of meetings where a coach or league official told me what my responsibilities were. However, I’ve never had a coach or league official ask me what my expectations were for my child. I understand that particular when coaches are volunteers, there’s hardly enough time for that sort of thing, and Lord knows I never made that effort when I coached, either.

But I wonder if a lot of these conflicts would lessen, or at least be better anticipated, if coaches and parents had a chance to discuss what the parents hope their child is going to get out of a particular sport in a particular league. That doesn’t mean a coach or league has to fulfill that exact thing, especially if the parents says stuff like, “I hope my 5-foot-2 15-year-old gets to play center on your basketball team.” No one is going to able to eliminate every bad behavior by parents; there are just some parents who are going to go over the top no matter what. But it seems to me the more that parents and coaches can get things straight with each other before the first practice, the better the experience will be for everyone. Especially the child — you know, the person actually playing.

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